Autonomous Drone Inventory Management on The New Warehouse Podcast

Inside the Episode

Corvus One flies warehouse aisles on its own. No pilot, no operator, no beacons on the ceiling, no markers on the racks. In episode 569 of The New Warehouse Podcast, Jackie Wu walks host Kevin Lawton through what it takes to make that dependable rather than a demo, and why Corvus designs and builds its own drones in California instead of assembling somebody else’s.

Owning the hardware is what makes the rest possible. Controlling the sensors means controlling the data coming off them, and controlling that data means training for the conditions a warehouse actually produces rather than the ones a lab does. The payoff shows up at deployment. Most automation asks the building to change first, through beacons, reflectors, or markers that have to be resurveyed every time racking moves or slotting changes. Corvus One asks for none of it, so a reslot stays an operations decision instead of turning into an automation project.

Those real conditions are stranger than any spec sheet suggests. Jackie describes drones meeting standing water from roof leaks, something the fleet had never encountered, and learning from it. The same passes that count pallets also surface damaged barcodes, stock in the wrong slot, and hazards nobody had logged.

The conversation closes on where this is heading. Jackie makes the case that 2025 and 2026 belong to large world models, the spatial equivalent of what language models did for text. For robotics that shift is the difference between reading a barcode and understanding a room.

What You Will Take Away

Listen to the Episode

Episode 569 originally appeared on The New Warehouse Podcast, hosted by Kevin Lawton.